Notice boards and bulletin boards provide a common location for groups of people and communities to post information about activities of interest to the group. They are usually located in a common area such as a print/copy room or lunch room. Some boards have rules governing the types of messages to post, but in general there are no formalities and any member of the group or community can post a message or notice. The concept is so popular, virtual bulletin boards also appear on the Internet.
Various types of writing boards are frequently used in meetings to enable the participants to take notes and display them to the group. Since a copy of the information recorded on the writing surface of the board is often desired, some boards will print a copy of the images on the board. Other boards will generate an electronic version of the information written on the screen. U.S. Pat. No. 5,455,906 to Usuda, Electronic Board System, describes an electronic board system having a display screen, a display unit, data processor and data storage. The electronic board system enables users to input data to be displayed on the screen by: writing with a pointing device directly on the screen, providing manually written or graphics data to an image reader which scans the data and provides it to the data processor, inputting data via a writing tablet connected to the data processor, and inputting data orally through a microphone connected to voice recognition software.
In any medium to large organization there will be a number of activities occurring concurrently with varying subsets of the organization's members involved. It can become very difficult for individuals to keep track of all the activities in which they might be interested but do not have a direct involvement. Solutions exist in which reports and shared calendars are used to address this but such solutions require additional overhead to keep up to date, and must often be actively looked for. The challenge is to provide a solution that provides awareness of the activities occurring in a workplace in an informal way without requiring additional work by its users.
Large screen user interfaces have been around for many years, having being pioneered in the 1970's by Myron Kreuger (Myron W. Krueger, “Artificial Reality III”, Addison-Wesley, 1991). Much recent work has focussed on the use of large screens for collaboration either between co-located or distributed users and using both 2D and 3D interfaces. In these cases the central concepts are to provide an interface which can be used simultaneously by more than one person and to provide a large working area that can fill the field of view without having to resort to “exotic” hardware such as head-mounted displays (HMDs) of the kind used for immersive virtual reality.
An example of usage of large-screens to support collaboration is the DynaWall (see Strietz, N, A, Geissler, J., & Holmer, T. “Roomware for Cooperative Buildings: Integrated Design of Architectural Spaces and Information Spaces” in N. Streitz, S. Konomi, H. Burkhardt (Eds.), Cooperative Buildings—Integrating Information, Organization, and Architecture. Proceedings of CoBuild98, Darmstadt, Germany. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1370. Springer: Heidelberg, 1998, pp. 4-21 and J. Geissler. “Shuffle, throw or take it! Working efficiently with an interactive wall”, CHI′98 summary, pp. 265-266). DynaWall, developed at GMD, is a large screen display with an active area of 4.5×1.1 meters and a resolution of 3072×768 pixels. The DynaWall is formed by three networked, back-projected electronic whiteboards each with its own controlling personal computer. User interaction is by hand-gesture and pen input. The implementers have developed a number of interaction techniques for manipulating objects on the display. The intent of the device is to support collaborative working, apparently using applications similar to those found on standard 2D GUIs.
Let's Browse (Henry Lieberman, Neil Van Dyke, and Adriana Vivacqua, “Let's Browse: A Collaborative Web Browsing Agent”, in International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Los Angeles, USA, January 1999) is described as an experiment in building an agent to assist a group of people in browsing by suggesting new material likely to be of common interest. It was built as an extension to a Web browsing agent called Letizia. Letizia performs a real-time, incremental breadth first search around the user's current page, and filters candidate pages through profiles learned from observing the user's browsing activity. Users wear active badges which enable Lets Browse to detect their presence, to identify them and to have access to their profiles. One side of the display shows the currently recommended page and the other side shows the users (and extracts of their profiles) for whom the current page is being recommended. In the current implementation there is no direct user input; instead the system operates in a “channel surfing” mode in which pages are displayed as the system finds pages which have a good match with the profiles of the users currently standing in front of the display.
Silhouettell (Masayuki Okamoto, Hideyuki Nakanishi, Toshikazu Nishimura, Toru Ishida, “Silhouettell: Awareness support for real-world encounter”, in Community Computing and Support Systems, Toru Ishida ed., Springer-Verlag, 1998, pp. 317-330) includes a large screen display that displays silhouettes of the users currently standing in front of it. It then displays common topics of interest and draws lines between users and topics in order to show the interests that the users have in common. A simple video based user recognition method is used which recognizes users based on the color of their clothing.
Examples of other less recent projects focusing on constructing portals to 3D include the Alive project (P. Maes, T. Darrell, B. Blumberg, and A. Pentland, “The ALIVE System: Wireless, Full-Body Interaction with Autonomous Agents”, ACM Multimedia Systems, special Issue on Multimedia and Multisensory Virtual Worlds, Spring 1996) and the CAVEs projects implementing an idea from Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti, Robert V. Kenyon and John C. Hart (“The Cave—Audio Visual Experience Automatic Virtual Environment”, Communications of the ACM, 35(6), June 1992, pp. 65-72).
In the Newspaper project at the Apple Advanced Technology Group, Lab members can send an email (using any email software) to an address dedicated to the Newspaper. An article with the subject of their email as the headline and the text of as the body is displayed on the front page of the Newspaper. A small picture of the sender, and an icon representing the sender's project appear next to the article. Users can view the article from a web browser on their desktop or portable computer or by simply walking through the lounge area to look at the projected display. (See Stephanie Houde, Rachel Bellamy, and Laureen Leahy. “In Search of Design Principles for tools and Practices to Support Communication within a Learning Community”, SIGCHI′98, Vol. 30, No. 2.)
Despite the above-mentioned usage of large screens, there is a need to leverage the similarities between large-screens and physical notice boards. In particular there is a need to use a large-screen wide display area as a dynamic publishing medium for a community of people.